Past research has found that work-family conflict is related to trait mindfulness, a unique disposition due to its amenability to change through training. This longitudinal study incorporated a mindfulness-based intervention including a mindfulness-based workshop and behavioral self-monitoring (BSM) in an attempt to reduce work-family conflict in employees. Trait mindfulness was correlated with work-family conflict across time. The intervention increased participants' trait mindfulness and decreased WIF, but did not reduce FIW. There was minimal support for the moderating roles of negative affect and perceived stress on the impact of the intervention. Overall the results provide support for the efficacy of mindfulness-based training as a provision to mitigate WIF. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as future research directions, are also discussed.

Due to the increase in dual-income families, work-family conflict has become a more prevalent phenomenon in today's society. Home healthcare workers have been previously identified as an employment group that is susceptible to high levels of burnout and low levels of job satisfaction, yet work-family conflict concerns have yet to be examined. Particularly because of the great deal of care being provided within a home, both at work and in life, this population is of particular interest for examining work-family conflict. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the relationships among work-family conflict, job satisfaction, affectivity, and burnout within a sample of rural, home healthcare employees. More specifically, four distinct models are proposed which include the following variables: positive and negative affectivity, number of hours providing care for others outside of work, number of hours worked per week, family-interference with work conflict, work-interference with family conflict, job satisfaction and three facets of burnout (personal accomplishment, depersonalization, and emotional exhaustion). While models predicting job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion accounted for the most variance, all four models provided information regarding the direct, indirect and mediating relationships of the aforementioned variables. More specifically, the findings suggest that the two types of work-family conflict uniquely mediate the proposed outcome variables highlighting the importance of examining work-family conflict from a more refined perspective. Exploratory group differences are also examined. This study contributes to a gap in the literature examining individuals' experiences of work-family conflict, job satisfaction, and burnout who are employed in a specific career field. Practical, research, and theoretical implications are discussed.

Gender development in Sweden is in the forefront and an increasing number of women choose to work.However, women still have the primary responsibility for home and family even though she and her partnerare working to the same extent. This leads to women, more than men, experience conflict between work andfamily. The conflict arises when then role, time and behavioral demands from one domain interfere orcompete with duties and responsibilities in the other domain. The purpose of the study is to examine femalemanagers' experiences of combining work and family as well as how they try to cope with demands from thetwo domains. I wanted to further explore the coping strategies used to handel the family demandsinterferance withthe work demands. This is a qualitative study and data was collected through semi-structured interviews. The results show that women primarily use problem-focused coping strategiesbytrying to solve the problem, planing and priortizing. Although, the problem-focused strategy to seek help andthe emotion-focused strategies to seek support and to accept the situation were also used.

Magister Psychologiae - MPsych / Women's roles in the workplace have increased but expectations within their family roles have not diminished. Work-family conflict (WFC) occurs when work and family roles are mutually incompatible in some respect. Mothers' representations of their own particular personal contexts seem largely absent from the cultural iconography and so motivations for the study included bringing to light the phenomenological experiences of contemporary full-time working mothers by developing a rich description of their lived experience. These ideas have not been widely explored in South Africa. The study aimed to explore how full-time working mothers experience work-family conflict, including how they conceptualise their dual roles, how salient each role is to them, the factors in the work and family domains which are particularly pertinent for them and any coping strategies they might employ. The study used as a theoretical framework the model of work-family conflict developed by Greenhaus and Beutell in 1985, together with an extension from the work of Amstad, Meier, Fasel, Elfering and Semmer in 2011. The study used a phenomenological methodology. Eight middle-class, professional, full-time working mothers from the Southern Suburbs and City Bowl of Cape Town were interviewed individually, using a semi-structured interview schedule. A qualitative paradigm was used to analyse the interviews. Emotional and cognitive repercussions of WFC were many, including feelings of unsustainability. Some participants acknowledged a need to compromise in order to cope, but the current normative messages are not conducive to this. Participants aspire, not to stop working, because the role of worker is regarded as important for self-definition, but to reduce their overall load. The generalisability of this study was reduced because of its localised ambit, its small size and some similarities in socio-economic profile among the participants. Future studies could further explore the choices or strategies which are successful in reducing WFC.

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between work-family conflict, stress and burnout among South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) employees. For this purpose data was collected from the SASSA agency offices in Alice, King Williams Town and East London. A sample of 72 agency employees was drawn from the population. Results of the study indicated that the study variables are significantly positively correlated with one another. Work family conflict was found to be significantly positively correlated with stress. Stress was also found to be significantly positively correlated with burnout. A significant positive relationship was also found to exist between work family conflict and burnout. The findings of this study are helpful in the social security agency industry in order to design human resources policies which will reduce turnover of agency employees by reducing stress, work family conflict and burnout among the agency employees.

The purpose of this study was to examine the development of work and family plans in young adults, and to clarify the long-term stability, prevalence, and consequences of anticipated work-family conflict. The study utilizes Super’s model of career development and social cognitive career theory, as well as research on current work-family interface, as a framework for understanding the period of anticipating and planning for multiple role integration that occurs between adolescence and adulthood. A sample of 48 male and 52 female college students assessed two years prior completed self-report questionnaires measuring work, marriage, and parenting experience; anticipated work-family conflict; and multiple-role planning. Results of this study suggest that students desire both a career and a family, and recognize potential challenges of a multiple-role lifestyle. Such recognition of anticipated work-family conflict varies by conflict domains and measurement methods, but remains stable over two years. Results also suggest that anticipated work-family conflict does not mediate the relationship between experience and planning; instead, marriage experience predicts planning directly. Implications for the findings are discussed as are suggestions for directions of new research concerning anticipated work-family conflict and planning for multiple roles.

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between female counselors’ work-family conflict and their demographic (i.e., ethnicity, age, educational level, and annual household income), occupational (i.e., ethnicity, age, educational level, and annual household income), and family (i.e., marital/partner status; number of children at home under the age of 18; age of youngest child; care of elderly, ill, or disabled family members; source of support; and support) characteristics. Super’s (1990) Life-Space Life-Span theory provided a framework to understand female counselors’ engagement in multiple roles in work and family and the conflict that can result in two directions: work interfering with family (WIF), and family interfering with work (FIW) (Frone, Russell, & Cooper, 1992). Female counselors were contacted through electronic email communication in which they received a link to access the online survey that totaled 51 questions. Female counselors from the state of Louisiana and Alabama participated in the survey for a sample size of 266. Pearson’s correlation indicated significant relationships for WIF and the following variables: (a) annual household income, (b) hours per week spent in employment, (c) counseling license, (d) workplace flexibility, (e) autonomy, (f) marital/partner status, and (g) source of support. For FIW, significant relationships were found for the following variables: (a) autonomy; (b) number of children at home under the age of 18; (c) age of the youngest child; (d) care of elderly, ill, or disabled family members; (e) hours per week spent in home chores and errands; and (f) support. Autonomy and hours per week spent in employment significantly predicted female counselors’ WIF scores. Autonomy; age of the youngest child; care of elderly, ill, or disabled family members; and support predicted female counselors’ FIW scores.

Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities School of Human and Community Development 0216845j mulaudzit@highveldmail.co.za / The aim of the present study was to explore how women general practitioners experience work-family conflict, their sense of coherence, coping resources as well as implications of these on their level of job satisfaction. This involved investigating the bi-dimensional model of the work-family conflict and measuring them against other investigated variables like coping resources, sense of coherence and job satisfaction. The research was conceptualized based on the stress and coping models. Literature review based mostly on international level revealed that women doctors do experience work-family conflict and that it does impact on their level of well-being. The sample, which consisted of women general practitioners residing in the Gauteng province, was obtained using snowballing method and non-probability sampling method. A hundred and fourteen questionnaires were distributed by mail and within a period of three months only 28 questionnaires had been returned of which 22 were used for statistical procedures. Statistical analysis involved a number of procedures including Pearson correlation, t-test procedures and partial correlation methods. The results revealed that women general practitioners do experience work-family conflict especially one aspect of it known as the family interference with work (F→W). Furthermore results indicated that the experience of work-family conflict, specifically the F→W amongst these women does affect their level of job satisfaction in a significantly negative way. Demographics on the other hand proved to have no significant impact on the level of job satisfaction amongst these women. Lastly, it was noted that even though these women employed a wide variety of coping resources none of them proved to have any significant effect on their level of job satisfaction.

Thesis advisor: Eric Dearing / Recent decades have seen historic increases in maternal employment. The developmental implications of work-family conflict, however, remain poorly understood. Children's (<italic>n</italic>= 1,364) social-emotional problems through early childhood and pre-adolescence were examined as a function of mother's work-family conflict using longitudinal data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD). Hierarchical linear modeling techniques were utilized to examine the lagged and contemporaneous associations between work-family conflict and children's social-emotional outcomes (i.e., internalizing and externalizing problems). Furthermore, family stress processes--maternal depression and maternal sensitivity--were examined as mediators of the associations between work-family conflict and social-emotional outcomes. Developmental timing of work-family conflict (i.e., child age) was also examined as a moderator of associations between conflict and social-emotional growth. Results indicated that within-family changes in work-family conflict predicted later within-child changes in children's internalizing problems in lagged models. With regard to between-family differences, average work-family conflict was associated with both average levels of internalizing and externalizing problems. Maternal depression and maternal sensitivity mediated the association between work-family conflict and children's externalizing problems between-families; maternal depression mediated the association between work-family conflict and children's internalizing problems between-families. There was little evidence to suggest, however, that the effects of work-family conflict differed as a function of developmental timing. Results from this research suggest that the developmental consequences of work-family conflict may not be immediate, but rather accrue over time. Moreover, results indicate that the effects of work-family conflict are both direct and indirect via family stress processes. These findings are further discussed regarding their implications for developmental research, policy and practice. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology.

Thesis advisor: Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes / The majority of family caregivers of older adults are also working for pay, and many experience work-family role conflict in managing both work and caregiving responsibilities. Work-family role conflict is associated with poorer psychological and physical health, which interferes with their ability to provide optimal care. Informed by role theory, this dissertation uses a randomized national sample of caregivers of older adults (N=465) to address the relationships between workplace characteristics, workplace flexibility, work-family role conflict, and caregiver stress. While much research has explored the work-family interface, few studies have investigated the workplace characteristics and work-family role conflict exclusively among caregivers of older adults. Additionally, the few studies exploring the relationship between workplace flexibility and stress among caregivers of older adults have yielded inconsistent findings. Results indicate that workplace characteristics associated with work-family role conflict among caregivers of older adults include supervisor support, work overload, work hours, and perceptions of a family-supportive work environment. A significant interaction effect between caregiving frequency (weekly vs. intermittent) indicates that while workplace flexibility is associated with decreased work-family conflict among those providing care intermittently, this association is not found for those providing care on a regular, weekly basis. A second set of analyses limited to regular, weekly caregivers (N=211) finds that work-family role conflict mediates the relationship between workplace flexibility and caregiver stress. This suggests that workplace flexibility may only benefit caregivers when work-family conflict is mitigated or reduced. Workplace flexibility is not associated with stress among caregivers in fair or poor health; caregivers struggling with their own health issues may need additional supports to manage work and family demands. These findings can inform the efforts of policymakers and practitioners working to promote the well-being of family caregivers of older adults. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.